Indeed it has. North Carolina Senator David Hoyle's (D-GA) now-defeated amendment (S-1209) was cosmetically titled "An Act to Ensure That A Local Government That Competes with Private Companies in Providing Communication Services Has The Support Of Its Citizens." But advocates of city/county backed high speed Internet projects just knew it as the Municipal-Broadband Must Die Die Die bill.

Hoyle's proposal would have banned any Tar Heel state city or county from contracting to "purchase, or finance or refinance" any kind of property to set up an "external communications system." The law defined the latter as anything that "provides broadband service or other Internet access service, cable service, telecommunications service, video programming service, or a combination of these services."

The bill would have effectively established a moratorium on this sort of activity. It also authorized the Senate's Revenue Laws Study Committee to (ahem) "study" the concept through this year, then study it some more next year, and, we presume, gradually ratiocinate the complexities of the question into the sunset.

Kidney failure

But it is Hoyle's act that is gone—its decline and fall narrated by Catherine Rice of the SouthEast Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (SEATOA). According to Rice, the state legislature's key House committee at first simply refused to consider the proposal. When the committee finally got around to the amendment, its principals killed the "external communications system" ban, then made the study optional.

When the matter got back to the Senate, one of Hoyle's colleagues merged some of his ideas into a kidney awareness bill. The new law again kept the study around as an option and added some sales tax refund provisions for the state's MI-Connection—Mecklenburg and Iredell counties' locally owned cable/Internet provider. But by the time everything got to the governor's desk, the moratorium idea was nowhere to be seen.

As the comment suggests, most muni-broadband advocates don't experience guys like Hoyle as the primary obstacle to their plans. They see them as front people for the incumbent cable and telephone companies, who lobby and sue to block or delay the concept as long as possible.

Salisbury stake

North Carolina isn't the worst locale when it comes to this kind of politics. Our state-by-state map of muni-broadband projects identifies NC as a "no barriers" zone. Eighteen other states have imposed some kind of fence against community broadband. Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Texas have established a full ban.

State-by-state municipal broadband barriers

This doesn't mean that communities in these areas can't work around the hostility they face. Tennessee, for example, is classified as a "various barriers" state, yet its fourth largest city is poised to receive the fastest municipally provided Internet and IP video service in the United States. Chattanooga's city-owned EPB Fiber Optics promises that its residents will soon be able to buy "Fi-Speed Internet 150"—fiber-to-the-home broadband with download and upload speeds of 150Mbps.

The big hope among muni broadband activists in North Carolina is that the path is now open for the town of Salisbury (population 32,000) to launch a similar project. Salisbury officials have been pushing for years for the right to launch their own fiber optic based muni-broadband system.

"We're on the verge of being the city of the future," Salisbury's Director of Broadband services boasted to Charlotte's WBTV news in May. The city says that starting this year, fiber Internet will be offered to "to every citizen in the Rowan county town who wants it."

So the bottom line, according to the fiercely pro-muni networks blog Stop the Cap, is that the campaign to block muni-broadband projects in North Carolina "is dead for 2010."

But nobody has any illusions that the enemies of this concept plan to withdraw from the field. "The next opportunity big telecom has for another anti-consumer bill is in January 2011," the post adds.

Matthew Lasar
Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Emailmatthew.lasar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@matthewlasar